Dear list members,
The Sanskrit Library transcoding facility on line at http://sanskritlibrary.org/transcodeText.html does indeed transcode to Romanization using the preferred Unicode composites of characters plus diacritics.  Our off-line transcoding software 
 which is downloadable from http://sanskritlibrary.org/downloads.html has a large array of transcoders one of which transcodes to Romanization using precomposed Unicode characters that include diacritics.  The problem with searching that Harry Spier mentions is just one of a number of reasons why Malcolm Hyman and I designed the Sanskrit Library phonetic encoding for all our linguistic programming, including both the encoding of texts and searching, and use Unicode only for display, and data input if desired (though for the latter purpose SLP and most other meta-encodings are preferable).  Our book Linguistic Issues in Encoding Sanskrit available at http://sanskritlibrary.org/publications.html discusses the issues comprehensively.

Yours,
Peter

On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 6:28 PM, Harry Spier <hspier.muktabodha@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear list members,

In unicode you can write characters with diacriticals with either a single glyph or you can combine the character with the diacritical writing it in two glyphs.

This is a problem when one searchs sanskrit etexts.

For example, the letters with diacriticals in the Muktabodha digital library are written with one glyph and as far as I can see GRETIL does the same thing.  But the transcoding utility at  "The Sanskrit Library"  http://sanskritlibrary.org/transcodeText.html
combines letters with their diacriticals in two glyphs.
 So if you used the Sanskrit Library utility to create a transliterated word such as for example: śākti and then searched texts from either GRETIL or Muktabodha for that word your search wouldn't find anything.

Thanks,
Harry Spier



_______________________________________________
INDOLOGY mailing list
INDOLOGY@list.indology.info
indology-owner@list.indology.info (messages to the list's managing committee)
http://listinfo.indology.info (where you can change your list options or unsubscribe)



--
*******************
Peter M. Scharf
*******************